BJU Press is a Christian educational publisher based in South Carolina. Their Writing and Grammar 9 book is designed for high school freshmen, around 14 years old. It follows a classical approach to language arts, moving through grammar, syntax, composition, and basic rhetoric. If you are looking for a download link for this book, I cannot help with that. It is copyrighted material and there are no legitimate free download sources. You would need to purchase it from BJU Press directly or through an authorized homeschool retailer. I will assume you have the physical book or a legitimate digital copy.
What BJU Writing And Grammar 9 Actually Covers
The book is structured around the trivium — grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Each unit builds on the previous one. Unit one covers parts of speech review. Unit two moves into sentence structure. By unit four you are doing paragraph composition. Later units tackle essay writing, basic research skills, and introductory rhetoric. The vocabulary section pulls from the word lists at the end of each chapter.
There is also a teacher edition that includes lesson plans, answer keys, and tests. The student text alone is not enough to run the course without the teacher materials. I learned that the hard way.
How to Use This Curriculum Week to Week
My wife and I ran BJU Writing and Grammar 9 with our daughter over a single school year. The publisher suggests five days per week, but most lessons can be completed in three to four days depending on your student's pace. Here is how we actually did it.
Monday is grammar and vocabulary. The student reads the assigned lesson, completes the exercises in the text, and checks answers against the teacher edition. This usually takes 20 to 30 minutes.
Tuesday is composition. The student writes a paragraph or short essay based on the prompts given in the lesson. We set a timer for 25 minutes. The student writes. Then they revise once using a rubric from the teacher edition. This took about 45 minutes total including the revision step.
Wednesday is reading and vocabulary review. The student reads assigned literature selections and works through vocabulary lists. This is lighter work, roughly 20 minutes.
Thursday is a continuation of composition or a unit project. Some weeks this is a longer essay. Other weeks it is a rhetoric exercise like identifying claims and evidence in a passage. This takes 30 to 45 minutes.
Friday is a quiz or test. The teacher edition has periodic review tests. These take 20 minutes. We skipped Friday testing in some weeks when the curriculum schedule shifted due to holidays or other priorities.
Common Problems and How We Worked Around Them
One specific issue came up early on. The curriculum expects students to write in full sentences and proper paragraph structure from the start. Our daughter had been homeschooled since kindergarten but her writing was very informal. She wrote like she talked. The first three weeks were rough because she kept turning in paragraph-sized sentences that were really just long strings of clauses.
The workaround was simple but not obvious from the manual. I stopped using the published rubric for the first month and switched to a checklist I wrote myself. The checklist had three items only: topic sentence, supporting detail, concluding sentence. That was it. Once those three things clicked for her, I reintroduced the fuller rubric. It took about four weeks before the textbook's own expectations felt fair to her.
Another problem was the rhetoric section. Units toward the back ask students to identify persuasive techniques in passages. The book uses examples from speeches and essays, mostly classical or historical texts. Our daughter found the vocabulary in those passages intimidating and spent more time decoding words than learning the rhetorical concepts. I had her look up ten words per passage before working on the rhetoric questions. That one change cut her time on those assignments in half.
A Few Things Nobody Warns You About
The vocabulary lists in BJU Writing And Grammar 9 are generated from the readings, not curated separately. That means the words are context-dependent and sometimes obscure. If you want students to retain vocabulary, you need a system beyond the weekly quiz. We used flashcards spaced over two weeks. Without that system, students memorize for the quiz and forget by Tuesday of the next week.
The teacher edition tests are cumulative but not heavily so. A unit five test might include one question from unit two. If your student struggles with retention, plan to revisit earlier grammar concepts every other week. A ten-minute drill on past sections prevents the spiral from becoming a freefall.
Is This Curriculum Worth the Time Investment?
Writing and Grammar 9 covers a lot of ground for one book. The scope and sequence is solid. The classical model means students learn structure before style, which is pedagogically sound. But there are real limitations.
The approach is rigid. If your student already has strong writing skills from prior coursework, this will feel slow. The grammar review units assume nothing and spend considerable time on parts of speech and sentence types. A student who already knows what a prepositional phrase is will find the first two units tedious.
The literary selections lean heavily toward Western canon and biblical references. That is consistent with BJU Press's mission, but it is worth noting if you want a more diverse reading list. The curriculum does not pair well with contemporary literature unless you supplement it yourself.
The teacher edition is the weak point. Some answers are vague. A few test questions have ambiguous correct choices. I spent more time second-guessing the answer key than the actual lessons. When the teacher edition conflicts with common usage, I default to standard references like the Chicago Manual of Style or Merriam-Webster.
If you need a more flexible alternative, consider Omega Press Writing and Rhetoric or Writing Well by Kate Roberts. They cover similar ground with more interpretive freedom. But if you want a structured, classical, faith-integrated approach and do not mind following a preset schedule, BJU Writing And Grammar 9 gets the job done. It just requires patience and a willingness to adjust when the manual does not match your student's actual needs.
